Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT

Hey ChatGPT, how can I ...

"Locking as this is a duplicate of [unrelated question]"

And then links to a similar sounding but ultimately totally unrelated site.

Nah, it just marks your question as duplicate.

Already had that happen with perplexity, like, no mate, I’m asking you.

Honestly, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

Is this a joke?

Shit like this makes me so glad that I just don’t sign up for these things if I don’t have to.

30 page TOS? You know what, I don’t need to make an account that bad.

ITT: People unable to recognize a joke

It's way easier to figure that out than check ChatGPT hallucinations. There's usually someone saying why a response in SO is wrong, either in another response or a comment. You can filter most of the garbage right at that point, without having to put it in your codebase and discover that the hard way. You get none of that information with ChatGPT. The data spat out is not equivalent.

When you paste that code you do it in your private IDE, in a dev environment and you test it thoroughly before handing it off to the next person to test before it goes to production.

Hitting up ChatPPT for the answer to a question that you then vomit out in a meeting as if it’s knowledge is totally different.

Split segment of data without pii to staging database, test pasted script, completely rewrite script over the next three hours.

If you use LLMs in your professional work, you're crazy

Eh, we use copilot at work and it can be pretty helpful. You should always check and understand any code you commit to any project, so if you just blindly paste flawed code (like with stack overflow,) that's kind of on you for not understanding what you're doing.

I feel like it had to cause an actual disaster with assets getting destroyed to become part of common knowledge (like the challenger shuttle or something).

Yeah but if you're not feeding it protected code and just asking simple questions for libraries etc then it's good

The last time I saw someone talk about using the right LLM tool for the job, they were describing turning two minutes of writing a simple map/reduce into one minute of reading enough to confirm the generated one worked. I think I'll pass on that.

This. I use LLM for work, primarily to help create extremely complex nested functions.

I don’t count on LLM’s to create anything new for me, or to provide any data points. I provide the logic, and explain exactly what I want in the end.

I take a process which normally takes 45 minutes daily, test it once, and now I have reclaimed 43 extra minutes of my time each day.

It’s easy and safe to test before I apply it to real data.

It’s missed the mark a few times as I learned how to properly work with it, but now I’m consistently getting good results.

Other use cases are up for debate, but I agree when used properly hallucinations are not much of a problem. When I see people complain about them, that tells me they’re using the tool to generate data, which of course is stupid.

I've tried a lot of scenarios and languages with various LLMs. The biggest takeaway I have is that AI can get you started on something or help you solve some issues. I've generally found that anything beyond a block or two of code becomes useless. The more it generates the more weirdness starts popping up, or it outright hallucinates.

For example, today I used an LLM to help me tighten up an incredibly verbose bit of code. Today was just not my day and I knew there was a cleaner way of doing it, but it just wasn't coming to me. A quick "make this cleaner:

<code>

This is what LLMs are currently good for. They are just another tool like tab completion or code linting

I use it all the time and it's brilliant when you put in the basic effort to learn how to use it effectively.

It's allowing me and other open source devs to increase the scope and speed of our contributions, just talking through problems is invaluable. Greedy selfish people wanting to destroy things that help so many is exactly the rolling coal mentality - fuck everyone else I don't want the world to change around me! Makes me so despondent about the future of humanity.

This is already at the point where we can replace an intern or one of the less good junior engineers.

This is a bad thing.

Not just because it will put the people you're talking about out of work in the short term, but because it will prevent the next generation of developers from getting that low-level experience. They're not "idiots", they're inexperienced. They need to get experience. They won't if they're replaced by automation.

So, the whole point of learning is to ask questions from people who know more than you, so that you can gain the knowledge you need to succeed…

So… if you try to use these LLMs to replace parts of sectors, where there need to be people that can work their way to the next tier as they learn more and get better at their respective sectors, you do realize that eventually there will no longer be people that can move up their respective tier/position, because people like you said “Fuck ‘em, all in on this stupid LLM bullshit!” So now there are no more doctors, or real programmers, because people like you thought it would just be the GREATEST idea to replace humans with fucking LLMs.

You do see that, right?

Calling people fucking stupid, because they are learning, is actually pretty fucking stupid.

This is already at the point where we can replace an intern or one of the less good junior engineers. Because anyone who has done code review or has had to do rounds with medical interns know… they are idiots who need people to check their work constantly.

Do so at your own peril. Because the thing is, a person will learn from their mistakes and grow in knowledge and experience over time. An LLM is unlikely to do the same in a professional environment for two big reasons:

1. The company using the LLM would have to send data back to the creator of the LLM. This means their proprietary work could be at risk. The AI company could scoop them, or a data leak would be disastrous.
2. Alternatively, the LLM could self-learn and be solely in house without any external data connections. A company with an LLM will never go for this, because it would mean their model is improving and developing out of their control. Their customized version may end up being better than their the LLM company's future releases. Or, something might go terribly wrong with the model while it learns and adapts. If the LLM company isn't held legally liable, they're still going to lose that business going forward.

On top of that, you need your inexperienced noobs to one day become the ones checking the output of an LLM. They can't do that unless they get experience doing the work. Companies already have proprietary models that just require the right inputs and pressing a button. Engineers are still hired though to interpret the results, know what inputs are the right ones, and understand how the model works.

A company that tries replacing them with LLMs is going to lose in the long run to competitors.

'Nuff said!

Nah, I can't imagine the Fallout that would cause

This has nothing to do with centralization. AI companies are already scraping the web for everything useful. If you took the content from SO and split it into 1000 federated sites, it would still end up in a AI model. Decentralization would only help if we ever manage to hold the AI companies accountable for the en masse copyright violations they base their industry on.

Anarchosyndicalism ftw.

List of Distributist parties in the UK:

• National Distributist Party
• British National Party
• National Front

Hmmm, maybe the Catholic part isn't the only part worth reviewing.

Also worth noting that the Conservative Party's 'Big Society' schtick in 2010 was wrapped in the trappings of distributism.

Not that all this diminishes it entirely but it does seem to be an entry drug for exploitation by the right.

I gotta hold my hand up and state that I am not read up on it at all, so happy to be corrected. But my impression is that Pope Leo XIII's conception was to reduce secular power so as to leave a void for the church to fill. And it's the potential exploitation of that void that attracts the far right too.

Well, reddit is doing fine so far. Shareholders are happy

I don't know. It feels a bit like "When I quit my employer will realize how much they depended on me." The realization tends to be on the other side.

But while SO may keep functioning fine it would be great if this caused other places to spring up as well. Reddit and X/Twitter are still there but I'm glad we have the fediverse.

CEO will have his bag and be gone by then.

god damn- I went over to Digg yesterday to see what its been like and I shit you not, it is links to reddit threads and instagram posts

Lemmy's bigger than ever, and that's a direct consequence of reddit's enshittification, so there's that at least.

It's very precisely that.

It's a metaphor for us killing ourselves in the processes of deforestation, not a story of someone actually making a coffin.

I counted around 30-32 in panel 2.

I think the reason for those bans is that they don't want you rebelling and are showing that they don't need you personally, thus ban.

Of course it's all retained.

They have been un-deleting after they ban.

Isn't that illegal in most countries?

They are also retained by anyone who has archived them., like OpenAI or Google. Thus making their AIs more valuable.

To really pull up the ladder, they will have to protest the Internet Archive and Common Crawl, too. It's just typical right-wing bullshit; acting on emotion and against their own interests.

They also committed to providing open dumps of their data to make it free to all. At the start, they were doing all the right things.

I once managed to find a pretty good alternative, but then I forgot its name. It was a very chill community unlike what Stackoverflow was recently with it's toxicity (properly formatted question police, people being offended for less popular languages, etc.).

I think you still have to have an account (last time I used it anyway), but you're right, there is a tier you don't have to pay any money for. It's just an email address but whatever. You can use it via their website but afaik they haven't released a free model based on the data they've scraped off us, so you can't host it on your own hardware and properly do what you want with it. I have heard though that commercial websites were/are using ChatGPT bots for customer service and you can easily use the customer service chatbots on their website to do other random stuff like writing bash scripts or making yo mama jokes.

Open access != Copyleft, but its a decent start.

CC attribution doesn't require you to necessarily have the credits immediately with the content, but it would result in one of the world's longest web pages as it would need to have the name of the poster and a link to every single comment they used as training data, and stack overflow has roughly 60 million questions and answers combined.

IF its outputs are considered derivative works.

Maybe but I don’t think that is well tested legally yet. For instance, I’ve learned things from there, but when I share some knowledge I don’t attribute it to all the underlying sources of my knowledge. If, on the other hand, I shared a quote or copypasta from there I’d be compelled to do so I suppose.

I’m just not sure how neural networks will be treated in this regard. I assume they’ll conveniently claim that they can’t tie answers directly to underpinning training data.

It does help to know what those funny letters mean. Now we wait for regulators to catch up..

/tangent

If anything, we're a very long way from anything close to intelligent, OpenAI (and subsequently MS, being publicly traded) sold investors on the pretense that LLMs are close to being "AGI" and now more and more data is necessary to achieving that.

If you know the internet, you know there's a lot of garbage. I for one can't wait for garbage-in garbage-out to start taking its toll.

Also I'm surprised how well open source models have shaped up, its certainly worth a look. I occasionally use a local model for "brainstorming" in the loosest terms, as I generally know what I'm expecting, but it's sometimes helpful to read tasks laid out. Also comfort in that nothing even need leave my network, and even in a pinch I got some answers when my network was offline.

It gives a little hope while corps get to blatantly violate copyright while having wielding it so heavily, that advancements have been so great in open source.

That’s the joke

I mean, sure but in the context of individual websites I don't see it being a big deal. There will be replacements, and relatively quickly. Accelerationism applied to major societal structures is a terrible idea though.

That's a terrible analogy, implying the wish that everyone on the plane dies if one engine fails.

It's like an airline company has been complete shit for decades, wanting to see them fail fast so that a better airline company can take their place.

Except it's not like a plane because we can stop using specific websites whenever we like, and build our own websites to whittle away at their hegemony.

While true, it's stupid that things are that way. They shouldn't be able to hide behind the idea that "we're not responsible for what our users publish, we're more like a public forum" while also having total ownership over that content.

you’ve implicitly agreed to it when creating your account

Many people would agree with that, probably most laws do. However I doubt many users have actually bothered to read the unnecessarily long document, fewer have understood the legalese, and the terms have likely already been changed _{pray I don't alter it any further}. That's a low and shady bar of consent. It indeed sucks and I think people should leave those platforms, but I'm also open to laws that would invalidate that part of the EULA.

At this point I’m assuming most if not all of these content deals are essentially retroactive. They already scrapped the content and found it useful enough to try and secure future use, or at least exclude competitors.

Honestly? I'm down with that. And when the LLM's end up pricing themselves out of usefulness, we'll still have the fediverse version. Having free sites on the net with solid crowd-sourced information is never a bad thing even if other people pick up the data and use it.

It's when private sites like Duolingo and Reddit crowd source the information and then slowly crank down the free aspect that we have the problems.

The Ad sponsored web model is not viable forever.

I’d rather the harvesting be open to all than only the company hosting it.

Assuming the federated version allowed contributor-chosen licenses (similar to GitHub), any harvesting in violation of the license would be subject to legal action.

Contrast that with Stack Exchange, where I assume the terms dictated by Stack Exchange deprive contributors of recourse.

SO already was. Not even harvested as much as handed to them. Periodic data dumps and a general forced commitment to open information were a big part of the reason they won out over other sites that used to compete with them. SO most likely wouldn't have existed if Experts Exchange didn't paywall their entire site.

As with everything else, AI companies believe their training data operates under fair use, so they will discard the CC-SA-4.0 license requirements regardless of whether this deal exists. (And if a court ever finds it's not fair use, they are so many layers of fucked that this situation won't even register.)

But users and instances would be able to state that they do not want their content commercialized. On StackOverflow you have no control over that.

Oh this looks decent. British non-profit, I like it. Registering.

Smells too much like duo-lingo. Here, everyone jump in and answers all the questions. 5 years later, ohh look at this gold mine of community data we own....

Yeah but didn't you see the sovereign citizens who think licenses are magic posting giant copyright notices after their posts? Lol

It's so childish, ai tools will help billions of the poorest people access life saving knowledge and services, help open source devs like myself create tools that free people from the clutches of capitalism, but they like living in a world of inequity because their generational wealth earned from centuries of exploitation of the impoverished allows them a better education, better healthcare, and better living standards than the billions of impoverished people on the planet so they'll fight to maintain their privilege even if they're fighting against their own life getting better too. The most pathetic thing is they pretend to be fighting a moral crusade, as if using the answers they freely posted and never expected anything in return for is a real injustice!

And yes I know people are going to pretend that they think tech bros won't allow poor people to use their tech and they base this on assuming how everything always works will suddenly just flip Into reverse at some point or something? Like how mobile phones are only for rich people and only rich people can sell via the internet and only rich people can start a YouTube channel...

Federated yahoo answers.

Hey, early Yahoo answers was very useful. A de-shittified, federated, stripped down to the bare questions-answers network could be neat.

It should stay for creative works but that's it. It should protect people who actually write books, compose music, make art, and sing. It shouldn't be held by corporations forever by leeching off their workers.

Wouldn't that make AI training data easier to obtain?

Public+ no copyright